Northeast Soviet Region to Get Its First Church

There has never been a church in the entire Magadan region of the Soviet Far East, an area three times as big as California and with a population of 500,000.

But now, a Russian Orthodox church is being built in the center of Magadan, a seaport on the Sea of Okhotsk that serves as the capital of the most Northeastern region of Siberia.

The church will stand next to a 60-foot-high memorial to the victims of Stalin’s infamous prison camps. The memorial is scheduled to be completed by sculptor Ernst Neizvestny within two years.

Until the 1930s the huge Magadan region remained virtually uninhabited except for nomadic reindeer herders and natives living in scattered villages along the coast of the Chukchi, East Siberian and Bering seas.

Then Stalin started shipping hundreds of thousands of prisoners to the area. More than 100 camps of the Gulag system were erected and support communities were built around them. Everything in the region evolved around the prison camps from the 1930s through the late 1950s.

“Since we were an atheist nation there never was a reason to build churches here. It was the policy of our government to discourage belief in a god,” explained Vyazheslav Kobets, the region’s governor. “Of course, pre-revolutionary Russian Orthodox churches still stand in many places in the Soviet Union. But they were never here.”

There seems to be a great deal of curiosity about religion everywhere in the country.

Foreign visitors are besieged by Soviet citizens, some of whom have been lifelong atheists, for any information they can get on their views of God. It is part of ane emerging phenomenon of people searching for something to believe in now that they have lost faith and confidence in the Communist Party and their government.

The 32 members of a medical expedition to the Magadan region, sponsored by the University of Alaska’s Institute of Circumpolar Health Studies, said Soviet doctors repeatedly asked them this summer if they believe in God and if they attend church.

Members of the medical group included MDs, dentists, psychiatrists, hospital administrators, dental hygienists and physicians’ assistants.

“In one meeting when the subject of God was brought up, we asked the Soviet doctors what they believed in,” said Anchorage psychiatrist Bill Richards, 49.

“They said they were brought up in the Communist system to be atheist and always taught not to believe in God, but to believe in the state rather than spiritual forces.”

Dr. Wandal Winn, 44, an Anchorage psychiatrist observed: “There is tremendous hunger in this country for ethics, morals and values to replace something they feel we have that they’re missing. The Soviet people are in a vacuum, looking around for meaning in life. I have been asked by Soviet doctors if I had a Bible I could give them.”

Winn said he believes the Soviet Union “is fertile soil for fundamentalistic Christianity. I would not be surprised to see it coming on very strong.”